Book 1: Immerse yourself in the enchanting world of “Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.” Follow the spirited Elizabeth Bennet as she navigates love, societal expectations, and the enduring charm of Mr. Darcy in this timeless tale of wit, romance, and social commentary. Book 2: Discover the unparalleled genius of “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare.” Traverse the vast literary landscape crafted by the Bard himself, encompassing tragedy, comedy, and sonnets that continue to captivate readers with their timeless themes and profound insights into the human experience. Book 3: Plunge into the depths of human struggle and resilience with “Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill.” O'Neill's poignant play, set against the backdrop of familial conflict, delves into the complexities of addiction, regret, and the elusive pursuit of happiness, leaving a lasting impact on the theatrical landscape.

Lois Potter traces Othello 's acting tradition as it affected the playing of Othello, Desdemona, characters originally played by a white actor and a boy, respectively, and Iago. She examines the stage and screen versions of the play, including a full study of Paul Robeson's 1943 avatar of the character, that reflect or challenge current views about race and gender.

Focusing on works by Shakespeare and Spenser, this study shows the connection between visuality and ethical action in early modern English literature. The book places early modern debates about the value of visual experience into dialogue with subsequent philosophical and ethical efforts.

Feeling Faint is a book about human consciousness in its most basic sense: the awareness, at any given moment, that we live and feel. Such awareness, it argues, is distinct from the categories of selfhood to which it is often assimilated, and can only be uncovered at the margins of first-person experience. What would it mean to be conscious without being a first person—to be conscious in the absence of a self? Such a phenomenon, subsequently obscured by the Enlightenment identification of consciousness and personal identity, is what we discover in scenes of swooning from the Renaissance: consciousness without self, consciousness reconceived as what Fredric Jameson calls "a registering apparatus for transformed states of being." Where the early modern period has often been seen in terms of the rise of self-aware subjectivity, Feeling Faint argues that swoons, faints, and trances allow us to conceive of Renaissance subjectivity in a different guise: as the capacity of the senses and passions to experience, regulate, and respond to their own activity without the intervention of first-person awareness. In readings of Renaissance authors ranging from Montaigne to Shakespeare, Pertile shows how self-loss affords embodied consciousness an experience of itself in a moment of intimate vitality which precedes awareness of specific objects or thoughts—an experience with which we are all familiar, and yet which is tantalizingly difficult to pin down.